"Cheap" iPhone

Steve Jobs: "Everyone wants an iPhone, but we need to make it more affordable". Sounds very cool and generous at first.

A classic example of charming marketing jabber from the most influential CEO in the industry.

The new $199 iPhone is actually $160 more expensive than the old $399 iPhone cause it requires a 2-year contract with a $35 monthly fee (old iPhone costed $20 a month). more here.

We all should learn from Apple.

Microsoft: the future of medicine

Video from Mix08. Looks really impressive.

Piracy Concerns

Piracy is what every software company worries about. We all do our best to protect our software from cracking, patching and other kinds or reverse engineering. But should we really try to build an invincible protection? With all these hardware-lockers, network activations and stuff?

No way. That's what we think here at Jitbit Software. And here is why:

There are three kinds of users:

1. Ones that will buy your software and never use a pirated version.
2. Ones that will never buy your software and search for a crack till death. If there's no crack, they turn to your competitor or even buy it with a stolen credit card, which is even worse, because you will have to deal with chargebacks and bank penalties.
3. Ones that will try to hack (or search for a pirated version), and if this cannot be done easily, they buy (bingo).

The purpose of a software protection system is - turn group 3 users into buyers. Period. A simple asynchronously (to prevent keygens) crypted serial number will do. But if you make it unbreakable, you will have to deal with carders and chargebacks from group 2. If you make it too complicated (network activation, hardware-binding, USB-keys and similar crap), you will lose your customers from group 1.

But this is not the whole story.

We all know, that you can buy a fake Rolex for 40 dollars, or a D&G shirt for 20... That's something we should learn from non-software (tangible) companies: D&G does not fight piracy! Actually D&G even encourages piracy as it promotes the original. That's why when you release the first version of the software, you should use an intentionally weak protection system.

When we released the first versions of our Network Settings Switcher and Macro Recorder back in 2004 (and Network Sniffer later), our serial number system was so lame, that a keygen was out two days after the release. We had gigabytes of traffic and thousands of visitors coming from piracy websites, but we've gained publicity, backlinks, downloads and Google-PR.

Google tech support

About a week ago I have contacted Google's support. I wanted to let them know, that when their web services (Google Apps, Google Reader, AdWords/Adsense etc.) are being accessed via httpS, the browser sometimes shows a security warning: "This page contains both secure and nonsecure items". This message is always shown when you click the "help" link, sometimes it even pops-up during normal operations (opening items, logging-in etc), especially when using "Google Apps".

Simple steps to reproduce: navigate to https://mail.google.com/mail/ and click "Help".

[webmaster-hat-on] The reason is obvious: some element on a secure web page (one that is loaded with "https://") is not being loaded from a secure source (uses "http://" absolute path). This typically occurs with images, JavaScript, frames, CSS etc. It's a well known "mixed content error" which can be easily fixed [webmaster-hat-off]

Anyway, I decided to contact support. First, it took me dozens of clicks to finally get to the Google Apps support form through all their suggestions and troubleshooters. Then, Google has answered me with an automated email with links to FAQs, top suggestions and the closing phrase: "if you still have unresolved questions after looking through this material, please reply to this email". I still had unresolved questions, so I replied. After 4 days of waiting the Google's answer was:

Please switch to Firefox
OR
use our application via unsecured http.

I don't want to read my confidential emails via unsecured http. I don't want to switch to Firefox. I guess I will continue seeing this lame error from Google webdevs...

When Windows Vista was first released we had a lot of trouble with our network switcher tool, cause Vista requires administrative permissions to change network settings on the fly. And getting admin permissions is a real pain under Vista. We've had tons of support requests. Imagine if we would answer:

Please use Windows XP
OR
Disable "User Account Control" in Vista security settings.

Of course Google is a giant company which gets tons of emails and support requests from their users and crazy fans. They are obliged to filter these requests by forcing users to read their FAQs and troubleshooters. They simply can't afford being personal. It's not their fault. But that's the advantage of being a mISV. You're small enough to be personal to your customers.


[UPDATE] 2 seconds after posting this, I found this thread on BoS: Google support

6 reasons to switch back to IE after months of Firefox

***Disclaimer: these opinions and views are my PERSONAL opinion and may be right or wrong.

A long time ago in a galaxy far away I was happy using IE6 and Symantec Antivirus and was pretty much sure I was protected from all kinds of malware, being very skeptical about all the IE vulnerability horror stories.

But you know what they say: "there are two types of users - the ones who already do backups, and the ones that will".

Of course after a while I accidentally discovered several trojan-programs on my drive. One was trying to connect to a botnet, another was trying to steal my email passwords... So I installed Comodo Firewall (which I believe is the best personal firewall software, which is also free) on all our machines, changed my antivirus, reconfigured my office and home routers and their built-in firewalls etc. etc. And moreover, I switched to Firefox.

But after many months and the release of IE 7 I'm back with IE and here is why:

1. Firefox is slow. Which is no surprise since much of Firefox and many extensions are written in Javascript (like any other application based on Mozilla's XUL platform).

2. IE7 is fast. In spite of all my toolbars - and I have ieHttpHeaders, IE Developer Toolbar, Google Toolbar, SEO Quake toolbar and more. But IE7 is still surprisingly fast

3. Memory requirements. I'm writing this post with 8 other tabs open in IE7, and two of them are loaded with heavy AJAX-rich Javascript applications that I've been running for more than two hours now. And IE7 uses only 89 Mb of memory. Firefox wants over 280 Mb for the same task, which is 3 times more.

4. Security & Privacy. IE7 comes with the latest code updates introduced in Windows XP SP2, including download blocker, improved URL parser, ActiveX add-on manager and optional Phishing Filter. IE7 also has privacy cleaners similar to the ones in Firefox (delete cookies, delete history, cache etc.)

5. W3C Standards. Firefox has always been a better renderer than IE6. Yes, writing HTML code for IE6 has always been a nightmare. Now IE7 has changed that.

(But still a lot of people use IE6, so we have to check our pages in it - we use a great tool called Multiple IE which makes it possible to test your websites under different IE versions, from 3 to 7).

6. Usability. I believe that IE7 has a cleaner look and is easier to navigate. IE7 finally has tabs, and tab-operations are simpler (for example, closing a tab in Firefox is a two-click operation).

IE8 public beta

Microsoft has released IE8 beta 1 to the public. The new version features HTML and CSS developer tools, Javascript debugger and more. Check out the first screenshots:

Uninstalling Firefox

Yesterday I had uninstalled Firefox and spent an hour cleaning the registry from Mozilla entries, cause after removing Firefox and switching to IE7 I got a lot of glitches. I googled a bit for some software cleaner which would remove these entries automatically, but found nothing. So I had to go through all the entries manually.

A rule of thumb when developing an uninstaller is: if your application registers some file associations, adds autostart entries, changes the system settings or anything else, please be so kind to restore everything back in the uninstaller. I was surprised that Mozilla developers are not aware of this rule.

7 reasons why I will never buy a Macbook Air

Macbook Air: the thinnest notebook ever, based on Flash-memory (still there's a HDD-version), featuring a 13,3" screen and a 1.6 GHz Intel Core-Duo inside.

It's undeniably beautiful. It's unbelievably thin. But:

1. Costs $3000 and has the same specs as a PC laptop for $1000
2. No DVD-drive. If you want to install some software, rip CDs or watch DVDs - get an add-on drive for another $100
3. Only one USB-port which is too little these days.
4. No Ethernet, No Firewire, No Audio-input... But you can get an adapter for all that. For instance, an Apple USB-to-Ethernet adapter for $30. But you won't be able to use Ethernet and DVD simultaneously (see #3).
5. Only 1.6 GHz which is a bit slow. But I've read that Apple even coaxed Intel into reworking their Core 2 Duo processor to be 60% smaller, just for the Macbook Air.
6. RAM is un-expandable. Stick to the default 2GB.
7. Nothing is replaceable. The battery is not user-replaceable, nor is HDD (if you choose a HDD-version). So if the battery dies in 2 years, you’ll be taking your notebook to Apple to replace it.

Yes, you pay more for smaller size, but who, exactly, is this product for? It's not a "subnotebook", but it fails to be a regular notebook.

IE8

The eighth version of Internet Explorer will be named "IE8" (obviously). But there were options:

• IE 7+1
• IE VIII
• IE 1000 (think binary)
• IE Eight!
• iIE
• IE for Web 2.0 (Service Pack 2)
• (my favorite!!!) IE Desktop Online Web Browser Live Professional Ultimate Edition for the Internet

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/12/05/internet-explorer-8.aspx

PDF contextual advertising

Adobe has announced that it has partnered with Yahoo to offer contextual advertising opportunities in PDF files. Yahoo will automatically insert ad's based on the context of the content PDF file.

Very smart move for Yahoo, IMO.

13 spoiled programs

In the software industry a program's new version is often worse than the previous one. Instead of becoming a better (faster, simpler and more powerful) software application over time, it turns into an over-sized monster, loaded with tons of useless features, bells and whistles. How about a hard disk defragmenter that can read email? It is quite possible according to Jamie Zawinski and his law that states that "every program attempts to expand until it can read mail".

PC World magazine has compiled a list of 13 of "earlier-is-better" software applications. Including (at no surprise):

• Windows Media Player (reason why many people use Media Player Classic)
• ICQ
• QuickTime
• iTunes
• and more, read on...

That's something we will try to avoid here at Jitbit, doing our best to develop neat software. If you ever find some of our tools too complicated, overloaded, slow or trying to be "everything for everyone", please send us some severe feedback.

iTunes killer and "top ten lies of lawyers"

Link-List:

• Amazon has launched a public beta of Amazon MP3, its new digital music download store offering DRM-free music files. Songs cost $.89 or $.99, and full albums cost from $5.99 to $9.99 - which is very nice. But the coolest thing about this - straight, DRM-free mp3-files, that can be played with ANY player, not just iPod or iTunes.
• Guy Kawasaki (I just love the man) writes about Top Ten Lies of Lawyers continuing his "top ten lies" series. Worth a read.